Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @11:34AM
from the ruining-it-for-everyone dept.

siliconbits writes "Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system. Google+1 selling sites like Googleplus1supply, buygoogleplus1 or Blackcatseo have cropped up during the last few months — amongst so many other websites — with the sole aim of selling Google+1 "likes" to publishers and businesses."

+1 came out before Google+. It was a way to basically "like" a search result. It also had a social component, so you could see the likes of your other friends when performing a search.

Ok...after reading further down...and saw that this is something apparently added to regular google searches I looked for it on a search..and can now see the very faint +1 link near links returned by a search. Strange, I had never noticed that being there at all before just now.

Not really no.Take my blog, obscure and possibly disliked by many who read it. That does not mean anyone who dislikes it should be banned. In fact what i want from the like/+1 system is that it shows me obscure gems that would otherwise fall under the radar.What's wrong with each user has a certain value, not all +1's being equal and all that. If google tracks you as well as some people think they do then fixing this could be as simple as:1) track all the websites a person visits (probably by IP address to

if someone makes a brand-new account and like more than a few things a day, it is an obvious seller of likes. ban.

Eh, when people make an account on Facebook or Google+ they usually have a huge spike of likes then. All your favourite music, movies, games and so on.. After that it slow downs and people like things randomly when they come across new things they, well, like.

Even if Google does get some code running that detects and bans them, well, it doesn't take long for people to study what works and what works and act upon that information. People aren't that stupid that they would just continue doing shit that gets

Don't ban them, just don't count their +1s until the behavior of the account gives sufficient evidence that it is legit. The humans who erroneously get flagged as possible bots wouldn't even know it and there would be no adverse impact on them. Since there is no ban, it's not as clear to the SEOs what it was that tipped Google off.

The only thing that Google+ is saying about their +1 affecting search ranking is that it will only increase the ranking of sites that people in your circles have +1'd.. so unless you plan on following a bunch of spam bots on Google+ I really don't see how this is an issue..

"+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust"http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194

Someone mod this up for God's sake. It shows that Google not only realized the potential for the problem but even addressed it before the beta began. Not to mention it shows exactly how Google intends to monetize Google+, by personalizing search results based on what a self-selected group of people similar to you enjoy.

It's pretty easy to see where this is going, though, and these companies are only thinking ahead.

Google quantifies you somehow. Person A and Person B aren't friends, but they both read a lot of/. and constantly search for tentacle porn. If Person A clicks on a link involving Natalie Portman and an over-excited tentacle monster, it might display that result with more importance for Person B.

[+1] will only increase the ranking of sites that people in your circles have +1'd.. so unless you plan on following a bunch of spam bots on Google+ I really don't see how this is an issue

But the +1 button [google.com] was around before the Google+ field trial began. In addition to Google+ circles, +1 also uses [google.com] Google Contacts, Google Talk chat contacts, Google Reader, and Google Buzz to determine social connections. But how can these be gamed?

This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. [nytimes.com] Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.

Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years, [google.com], and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.

Google is a complete fucking pile of FAIL when it comes to anything related to customer support. They don't fix spam problems and spammers have been flocking to gmail/googlemail for ages now because Google actively protects them by hiding origin IP headers.

Then they let users add stuff to Google maps, and guess what? IT's becoming a spam hole thanks to the hoards of Avon reps & home "Scentsy" businesses. Even in my sparsely populated area, i'm seeing several worthless mommy-biz entries.

hey look, i'm standing on your lawn with hundreds of millions of other global millennials and we cherish the thought of forcing you to accept our grammar and "incorrect" forms of activism for the rest of your fragile and worthless existence. Lulz.

hey look, i'm standing on your lawn with hundreds of millions of other global millennials and we cherish the thought of forcing you to accept our grammar and "incorrect" forms of activism for the rest of your fragile and worthless existence. Lulz.

Might happen, but I wouldn't bet my life savings on it. For every permanent addition to the language, there's a fad that dies the death when its time is up.

"Groovy" was a cool, popular word during the flower power era. *No-one* uses it now, except as a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the era it's inexorably tied to.

More recent example- remember 13375p34k? Pretty common a few years back. When was the last time you heard anyone use it seriously, or even tongue-in-cheek?

Guess what, the English language is constantly evolving. Either way you're wrong: [merriam-webster.com]

2fail noun

Definition of FAIL

1: failure —usually used in the phrase without fail2: a failure (as by a security dealer) to deliver or receive securities within a prescribed period after purchase or sale
See fail defined for English-language learners First Known Use of FAIL

–noun13.Stock Exchange.a.a stockbroker's inability to deliver or receive security within the required time after sale or purchase.b.such an undelivered security.14.Obsolete . failure as to performance, occurrence, etc.—Idiom15.without fail, with certainty; positively: I will visit you tomorrow without fail.

Maybe next time actually know what you are talking about before speaking up?

It's a good thing they're forcing people to use real names in order to prevent abuse of the system!

...wait, you mean it's _not_ stopping people determined to exploit the system or make a nuisance of themselves, it's just harming the people interested in maintaining a long term presence on G+? Say it ain't so!

This won't affect anyone except the spammer's marks and people in the circles of those marks.

The +1s you give may affect results for you and to a lesser extent the results of people who you are linked two both ways (you have them in a circle and vice-versa).

The only way this is going to affect users in general is if those users have had their accounts hacked (by falling for a phishing attack or such) and are being used to click the +1s without their knowledge (and no spammer is going to waste time on

This is what I was thinking. There are websites selling Google likes. If this is a problem, it should be trivial to link the accounts used by the webistes and deactivate them. Google could even deactivate the accounts of those who buy the likes.

If google is not doing this, then it is difficult to assume that the problem exists, at least as far as Google is concerned. It is like link farms. It should be easy to identify the layout of a link farm, so the fact that so many of my search have link farms i

That leaves me conflicted: On the one hand, this means that money will be leaving the hands of the vile pigfuckers who buy SEO spam. On the other hand, it means that money will be entering the hands of the degenerate subhumans who produce SEO spam....

Let's see... you're posting advertising on a page for geeks and nerds who have an innate hatred for people who try to abuse "their" system and who are also well known for their zeal to protect their turf and prefer meaningful search results to bullshit advertising in them. In other words, you're talking to the people who will most likely hate you with a passion and who also happen to know a fair lot about the technology you use.

So I wonder, do you want a free audit, are you trying to find out how resilient

Meta-moderation worked on/. too, why not for Google? It should be trivial to easily identify such "services" by their likes being quickly metamoderated into the ground, hence rendering all their "likes" worthless. Of course, this again can be gamed, but with enough layers of moderation, meta-moderation and meta-meta-moderation, it should become rather tricky for such "services" to continue their business against the rest of the internet users.

I think part of why it works on Slashdot is that there is a community of continually interested people and a focused topic. It's hard to imagine people with that level of interest in "policing" the web at large. I think this is why crowd-sourcing is so easily gamed. While some people will sometimes be interested enough to help police things, the only ones who will be continuously motivated and dedicated are the spammers looking for financial gain.

Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system.

That rumbling you hear is a million deceased writing teachers digging out of their graves to make siliconbits diagram that "sentence."